The Darwin Awards Countdown to Extinction
Page 7
The officer attempted to rescue her again, but alas, it was too late.
The victim’s mother speculated that her daughter’s motivation for jumping into a flooded creek was to rescue her drowning moped. “She loved that thing.”
Reference: news-record.com, Greensboro, NC, wxii12.com
Reader Comments
“Just because you have two rubber wheels does not mean you cannot drown . . .”
“North Carolina’s finest . . . First-ever woman to become a finalist for the Darwin Awards.”
“First woman ever!! Are we honored or what?! NOT!”
While North Carolina does not require a license to operate a moped, if a person is caught driving any vehicle (moped, golf cart, tractor, bicycle, etc.) on public roads while intoxicated, the state (and many states) will be able to prosecute for a DUI conviction.
Darwin Award Winner: She Talks Faster Than She Walks
Confirmed by Darwin
Featuring a woman, car, and machismo
30 MAY 2009, LOUISIANA | Backseat drivers beware! Annoyed at how slowly her boyfriend was driving, Tamera B., twenty-two, encouraged him to pick up the pace so she could get to work on time. Joking that it would be faster to walk to work, she opened the door of the pickup truck and stuck her foot out—before falling out the open door to her death. Whoops!
But wait! Was her complaint valid?
Nope. Deputies of the jurisdictional sheriff’s office stated that the truck was traveling at “highway speed” on I-12 at the time of the incident. Her death was ruled accidental.
Reference: New Orleans Times-Picayune, Nola.com
Reader Comment
“A small consolation—she got the last word!”
Darwin Award Winner: Wetting the Bed
Confirmed by Darwin
Featuring a woman, water, weather, and machismo!
27 OCTOBER 2009, ARKANSAS | Thirty-year-old Ms. Devan-LeAnn of Shongaloo, Louisiana, was visiting Lake Erling with a male friend. Recent bouts of heavy rain had resulted in a flood of runoff water, and the two decided it would be “fun” to take a mattress careening down the surging water in the spillway.
An air mattress would be one thing. Unfortunately Devan-LeAnn was riding a foam egg-crate mattress pad. Imagine a wet foam pad. Are you sinking yet?
According to her friend, Devan-LeAnn simply vanished from sight at dusk. The next morning her body was found in a tangle of trees seventy yards below the spillway.
Parents, warn your children! Wetting the bed can be deadly.
Reference: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Texarkana Gazette
Reader Comments
“LOL! I’m glad I’m over that habit [embarrassed laugh].”
“At least she died in bed . . .”
Darwin Award Winner: Missed (but Not Missed By) the Bus
Confirmed by Darwin
Featuring a woman, a vehicle, and a can of pop!
13 AUGUST 2009, CANADA | A twenty-four-year-old was ironically successful in her attempt to catch a bus in Quebec City. Clutching a can of pop, the woman ran into a restricted area and tried to flag down a forty-five-foot bus that had left on time—a minute ago—without her. As she tried her best to get herself noticed, she herself failed to notice that the bus was making a swift turn in her direction.
A veteran driver pointed out that drivers cannot hear anything over the sound of their engines. The woman stood her ground—and disappeared beneath the turning bus. Suddenly, she was no longer able to concern herself with getting there on time.
Considering that you have to go out of your way to get mowed down by a bus in a transit center—such as sneaking around barricades into a restricted area and running under the tires—the bus company said it does not plan to increase security.
Instead of riding home in a crowded bus, the deceased woman enjoyed one last luxury: a private one-way trip “home” in a hearse.
Reference: Le Journal de Quebec, CBC.ca
At-Risk Survivor: A Clear Lesson
Unconfirmed Personal Account
Featuring women and a glass door
2009 | When she was younger, a college student had accidentally run right through the glass sliding doors at home. Ouch! After that painfully “clear” lesson, her family put decals on the doors to keep it from happening again. After all, glass is expensive.
Years later, the student was home for school break. She was doing some chores for her parents when she decided to clean the sliding glass doors. She took off the decals, put them aside, and began to polish the glass. Then the family dog sidetracked her. When the industrious daughter returned to the kitchen a few minutes later, she had already forgotten about those glass doors.
Father to daughter: “And this is why we pay all that tuition?”
She saw her sister in the backyard, walked at a fast pace toward her, and smashed right through the glass again!
The lesson? Never—never—walk away from an unfinished job.
This lesson was learned all too dearly by the author herself (p. 3).
Reference: Anonymous
Darwin Award Winner: Epitaph—She Liked Feathers
Confirmed by Darwin
Featuring a woman and gravity
22 FEBRUARY 2009, UK | A woman in her forties was following a coastal footpath along the top of a cliff in Devon. While enjoying the natural scenery she noticed a beautiful feather floating just out of reach. Fencing was in place to protect people from falling, but this protective fencing was no match for the allure of a feather blown by the breeze. While chasing the elusive plume, the woman climbed the fence, slipped, and fell.
An experiment much like this one was performed from the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa. There is truly a fine line between genius and madness. Our heroine was on the wrong side of that line.
Eighty vertical feet later, the experiment data point landed.
She was airlifted to the hospital, but unfortunately there was no cure for what ailed her, and she died of head injuries the following day.
Reference: Telegraph.co.uk
At-Risk Survivor: Pill Pusher
Confirmed by Reliable Eyewitness
Featuring a woman, teen, and medicine
Darwin says, “We asked for medical submissions and have greatly enjoyed the responses! ”
PENNSYLVANIA | My husband worked at a small, busy rural pharmacy. His customers were hard-working, simple people. Early one morning he dispensed a prescription to the mother of a teenager for anti-nausea tablets and suppositories, labeled with what he thought were clear directions.
Early that evening he received a phone call from the child’s mother, asking when the medications would take effect. Knowing that the suppository should have taken effect within an hour, he asked which form of the medicine she had given the child. The mother said she had tried both tablets and suppositories, but the patient was still experiencing severe nausea.
Since the child was evidently sicker than originally diagnosed, my husband told her that she needed to call the doctor and ask for further instructions. Then the mother asked the key question: Should she have unwrapped the suppository before her child swallowed it? That winner was quickly followed by her inquiry as to how far she should have inserted the tablet rectally, or rather should it have been inserted vaginally?
To this day, he includes directions for unwrapping suppositories before use, as well as stating that tablets should be taken by mouth!
Reference: Ann Boncal
Reader Comments
“Do we really need suppository instructions?”
“I used to think people had some brains.”
“. . . and they say a pharmacy is dull?”
SCIENCE INTERLUDE SEX ON THE BRAIN
By Robert Adler
Suppose our big brains didn’t evolve for practical reasons such as better hunting, gathering, or fighting—things that our less-endowed primate cousins do quite well. What if the explosive growth in brain power that made us what we are today had noth
ing to do with fitness, but everything to do with sex?
That ’s what evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller thinks, and presents in convincing detail in his book, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. (New York: Vintage, 2001)
What counted wasn’t the ability to pitch a spear more accurately, but the ability to pitch a good pickup line.
Our brains ballooned over the last two million years not to make us more fit on the savannah, but to make us more marketable in the Pleistocene equivalent of pickup bars, Miller says. Sexual selection—the individual mating choices of thousands of generations of our ancestors—is driving the growth of our big brains.
Art, Music, Language, and Creativity
Sexual selection’s fingerprints are all over a bouquet of complex and colorful human capacities, valued and attractive talents that have little to no survival value. Miller’s list includes expressive arts such as music, poetry, painting, dance, personal decoration, and universally admired qualities—such as generosity and heroism—that are tough to explain based on survival of the fittest.
“Theories of human mental evolution just weren’t accounting for (these) aspects of human behavior,” says Miller. Sexual selection, which accounts for many of the most surprising features of plants and animals, does a much better job of explaining a range of useless human talents. His ideas may even shed light on the evolutionary history that lurks behind the fatal displays of risk-taking and derring-do that garner Darwin Awards.
Survival of the Sexiest
The idea started with Darwin. In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin argued that evolution winnows every generation through two sieves: fitness, which selects adaptations that help us survive; and sexiness (sexual selection), which selects adaptations that help us mate. Fitness selection might lead to warm fur, and the ability to communicate. Sexual selection might lead to long hair and a pleasant voice.
Fitness selection has enjoyed extensive scientific scrutiny while sexual selection has been an afterthought, but current researchers are taking an avid interest in sex. After all, survival is worthless, from an evolutionary point of view, unless you manage to woo and win a mate.
Sexual selection is powered by two main engines: competition among potential suitors and individual choice of mate.
Competitive selection—competition for mating rights—sets up an arms race that leads to aggressive, well-armed males who fight for access to females. Picture a male lion and his pride, or a stag sporting his rutting rack of antlers. While competition leads to fairly predictable outcomes, mate selection is another matter.
Survival is worthless unless you manage to woo and win a mate.
Mate selection—evolution’s wild card—is based on whatever aesthetic qualities happen to lead an individual to mate with one partner and reject another. Mate selection can home in on any feature or behavior that happens to attract and impress the opposite sex. Favorites include bright colors, rhythmic movements, and melodious voices, but there are practically as many possibilities as there are species.
Sexual selection is powered by competitive selection and mate selection.
Through a hypothetical process called runaway sexual selection, those attractive qualities can be exaggerated to an astonishing degree. You can see it coming—the bird everyone agrees is frivolous—the peacock! Mate selection led to the insane plumage of peacocks, the meter-tall architectural nest of the bowerbird, and perhaps to many of hu manity’s most cherished creative abilities. The next time you show your moves on the dance floor, wink at the driver of that flashy sports car, or splurge on a new tattoo, thank your smart, sexy, selective ancestors—who knew there was more to life than mere survival.
Choosy Men Choose Too
One important way in which Miller departs from Darwin is in the kind of mate selection he sees operating in the human animal. Darwin’s examples of mate selection involved flashy males showing off to attract choosy females. Miller points out that if that had been a dominant pattern in human evolution, men and women might have evolved minds as different as the plumage of peacocks and peahens.
Instead, human mental capacities seemingly evolved through mutual mate choice—our male and female forebears were equally attracted to smart, creative, communicative mates. Men have the reputation of being less picky than women when choosing sexual partners, but recent research has shown that that’s not the case when it comes to serious relationships that lead to children.
Our brains are more like entertainment centers than Swiss army knives.
Let the Big-Brained Beware
However much we value our verbal, creative, and interpersonal skills, there’s a catch. If Miller is right and our brains are more like multifunction entertainment centers than Swiss army knives, if we have been bred more to woo and win mates than simply to survive, then we may be a lot less practical and rational than we think.
Out of necessity, survival selects for realistic problem-solving minds, but sexual selection is not obliged to follow suit. It obviously favored human males who were driven to demonstrate their skills, even if that meant taking (cough) risks. Miller believes it also favored imaginative storytellers over plodding realists, creative dreamers and self-confident explorers over sensible worker bees.
It’s encouraging to think that our minds evolved as much to dream, play, and create as to struggle to survive. “Our ancestors were more lovers than fighters,” says Miller. “That’s important for our self-concept as a species. It highlights the deep roots of love, and the attractiveness of moral virtues.”
Still, we shouldn’t be surprised if some of those playful dreamers “slide” off thousand-foot cliffs (see p. 227), do one pull-up too many on the ski-lift drive wheel (p. 51), or find other creative, dramatic and high-risk ways to take themselves and their genes over the edge and into the annals of the Darwin Awards.
REFERENCES:
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871).
G. Gehrer and G. F. Miller, eds., Mating Intelligence: Sex, Relationships, and the Mind’s Reproductive System (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007).
G. F. Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Vintage, 2001).
G. F. Miller, “Sexual selection for moral virtues,” Quarterly Review of Biology 82(2) (2007), 97-125.
M. Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003).
CHAPTER 6
THE FAST TRACK: TRAINS, CARS, AND BAR STOOLS!
“The Darwin Awards are always interesting. I sometimes wish that certain people would try to win one . . . You know who they are.”
—excerpt from Fan mail
Vehicular misadventure is always a winning ticket. The following tales offer variations on a theme with squished sports cars, military men gone wild, dancing drivers, insurance fraud, and the invention of a whole new type of hybrid. Hang on to your hats . . .
Motorized Bar Stool ● A One-Track Mind • Poor Decision on a Major Scale • Painkiller • Mock Death • Chutes and Spills • ICanSay/ToldYouSo • Flying Door • Clap-Clap-Clap Your Hands • Cats Land on All Fours
At-Risk Survivor: Motorized Bar Stool
Confirmed by Darwin
Featuring vehicles, alcohol, and do-it-yourself innovation
4 MARCH 2009, NEW JERSEY | The Newark Fire Department was called to assist a man who had suffered injuries from a crash—while driving a motorized bar stool! The man claimed that his lawnmower-bar-stool hybrid could reach a speedy thirty-eight mph on its five-horsepower engine, but he was traveling a sedate twenty mph when he rolled and crashed while making a turn.
Although under the speed limit, he was over the drink limit. During a police interview at the hospital, he admitted to consuming “about fifteen beers.” When numbers reach the double digits, it’s hard to be exact. The driver was issued a citation for operating a vehic
le (classified as “all others”) while intoxicated, and driving with a suspended license—presumably the motivation behind his motorized creation.
He pleaded not guilty—demanding, in fact, a jury trial before his peers. Those of you who drive motorized bar stools and other unconventional vehicles, watch your mailbox for a jury summons.
If the twenty-eight-year-old inventor wants to drive a hybrid, he should consider modifying his bar stool to corner better—once he regains the right to operate a motorized vehicle on public roads.
Reference: Newark Advocate, The Boston Globe
Reader Comments
“License to Spill.”